Coming across a public confession on the Internet.

Several companies have recently used info found on sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn to fight fraudulent workers’ compensation claims.

Sometimes, employees will blatantly brag about fooling companies. More often, though, they’ll describe strenuous activities they’ve recently participated in (playing sports, for example) while they’re supposedly too injured to work. For example:

• A Los Angeles-area warehouse worker filed a work-related back injury claim — but then posted on Facebook about bowling tournaments he’d competed in, after the injury.
• Dollar Tree had paid out over $100,000 over a year and a half to an employee with back problems. Her MySpace page listed a side job as a wedding photographer. Suspicious, the company sent representatives to conduct surveillance, and the employee was spotted lugging heavy camera equipment with no signs of back pain.
• Claims investigation service GlobalOptions Group even reports finding an employee who posted videos of himself competing in a rodeo while he was supposedly too injured to get out of bed.

A local resident notified the Altoona, IA, police department after he discovered cop Abigail Keller’s MySpace page containing inappropriate photos of her at a bar. In one shot, she was mooning the camera, while in others she performed simulated sex acts, Associated Content reports.

Keller’s response: The pictures were posted a few years ago, before she was hired — and she (mistakenly) believed her profile was blocked from public view.

The department fired her. Was that the legal thing to do?

Yes. When Keller took the city to court, a judge ruled the firing was justified, since a police force must maintain a good reputation in the public’s eye.

However, the court did grant Keller unemployment pay, because she did not “intentionally disregard” the department’s interests.

A new survey by ScanSafe, a  SaaS Web security provider, found a 20% increase in the number of its customers blocking social networking sites in the last six months.

Currently, 76% of those customers are choosing to block social networking. It’s now a more popular category to block than past favorites like online shopping (52%), weapons (75%), alcohol (64%), sports (51%) and Web mail (58%).

Less than half (47%) of ScanSafe customers block banking sites.

“When Web filtering first became an option for companies we generally saw them block access to typical categories such as pornography, illegal activities and hate and discrimination,” comments Spencer Parker, director of product management at ScanSafe.

“In recent months, employers are obviously wising up to the dangers and negative impact on productivity linked to certain sites and more and more of our customers have chosen to block social networking.”

Also, the company attributed the threat of malware to the increase in blocking.

Does your company block access to those sites? Why or why not? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Of course, there’s still a lot of debate going around as to whether bosses and employees should “friend” each other on Facebook, MySpace and other sites. Some say that’s a line neither party should have an interest in crossing.

But others disagree, saying online contact can help build a relationship between employees and their managers, and therefore, the company as a whole.

Some possible benefits to managers setting up online profiles:

1. Seeing glimpses of a boss’s personal tastes, non-work interests and family life could make him or her more approachable in employees’ eyes. That’s good for productivity, trust and morale.
2. Supervisors can also learn more about employees, which could help them tweak their managerial styles.
3. New avenues of communication could generate new problem-solving ideas.

Do you any of your managers communicate with employees through Facebook or other sites? Do you think the pros outweigh the cons? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

“Please list any and all current personal or business Web sites, Web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”

Translation: If there are any embarrassing details about you on the Internet, we want to see the stuff.

Alas, the city’s leap into the Digital Age was not to be. When word of the new employment requirement got around, Bozeman officials took all sorts of flak for “trampling civil liberties” and “snooping on citizens.” Residents, the American Civil Liberties Union and a few outraged politicians got into the act.

A few days later, an embarrassed City Commission chopped the policy, saying, “We apologize for wandering down a road that violated basic rights of our citizens.”

The obvious moral of the story: Employers who ask for private Web info are also asking for trouble.

Maybe you haven’t encountered any problems with employee posts on Facebook, MySpace and the like. The question is: Should you wait till you have a problem?

Consider the numbers — and the odds that your organization will have a problem:

• About half of all adults in the U.S. have a Facebook or MySpace account.
• The number of people using Twitter has grown by 1,300% in the past 12 months.

So it’s a pretty good bet that some of your employees using those sites at some time or another, and for who-knows-what.

Further, a study by Deloitte of 2,000 workers nationwide showed:

• 74% of employees who responded said they were aware that such sites make it “easier” to damage an employer’s reputation.
• 53% said their networking pages weren’t an employer’s business; that number rose to 63% for employees in the 18-to-34 age bracket.
• 17% said their companies had policies regarding posts to social-networking sites.

It’s another matter altogether whether you have the time and resources to monitor employee activity — at work or at home — on such sites and how postings might affect your company’s reputation.

Still, you can have in place a simple policy that gives you the authority to take steps should you somehow uncover a damaging entry. And having a policy removes the “I didn’t know” excuse if an employee does post something damaging.

So, what should a policy look like? Generally, the less complicated the better. In fact, yours can boil down to two main parts:

1. Establish that employees have no right to absolute privacy when they post on a social-networking site. And it doesn’t matter where they connect from. If it’s on the site, it can be read. And it can be used as grounds to discipline an employee.
2. Remind them that the policy extends to instances of harassment, discrimination and any other behaviors that are barred by law or company policy.

Don’t forget to note that the company has no desire to play Internet cop or keep employees from enjoying social-networking sites. The policy is in place to protect the company and its employees, not to prevent people from using the Web sites in usual, harmless ways.

Here’s an example of one company social-networking policy.

Suppose an angry employee uses a social-networking Web site to trash your company, your managers and even your customers. Can you legally take action against the employee? The results of a landmark federal-court case will provide the answer.

Combine the specter of layoffs, pay freezes and benefit cuts with the popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook, and you have what’s become a not-uncommon situation: Employees — from home and on their own time — criticizing their employers for all the Internet world to see.

Could they be fired?
In the court case in New Jersey, two restaurant employees created and contributed to a forum about their workplace on MySpace.com. They e-mailed invitations to co-workers, who then had to log in using a personal e-mail address and a password.

The two employees criticized the restaurant’s decor, ridiculed its customers — including sex-laced jokes — and made harsh comments about their supervisors.

The employees charge that their managers illegally accessed their online communications in violation of federal wiretapping statutes and that the managers also violated their privacy under New Jersey law.

So, here’s what the court will decide:

• Are off-work Internet postings about employers grounds for discipline by the employers?
• Do password-only postings have special privacy protections that preclude any type of discipline by employers?
• Can employers establish policies about employee expression and attitude that extend to Web postings?

We’ll keep you posted on the outcome.

Note: Some states protect employees who engage in lawful, off-duty activities from being fired or disciplined. While private conversations might be covered under those laws, none of the statutes specifically addresses social networking or blogging.

Here are three danger zones:

• Suppose you run across a Facebook photo of your candidate swilling beer in his underwear at a wild party. Would that push you to deny the person a job? In some states it’s illegal to deny a job to someone because of off-duty conduct that’s legal. (And while guzzling beer while wearing nothing but skivvies isn’t exactly model behavior, it’s not illegal.) The exception: If you can show a link between the depicted behavior and the person’s job duties — and how that behavior might interfere with the duties — that’s legal.
• If you use a third party service to conduct certain types of background checks, the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires that you give prior notice of the check to the applicant being investigated. And some states, such as California, require notification even if you do the check yourself. Of course, if you were searching Facebook, you wouldn’t want to alert a candidate who might rush online to remove offensive material. No one knows whether the notification rules in the FCRA apply to a Facebook search. And the only likely way we’ll find out is if there’s a test case.
• Let’s say you go on Facebook and stumble upon the candidate’s description of his battle against AIDS. Now, you may not even think about using health as a reason to deny the person a job. But if you do turn the person down and he raises the question of disability discrimination, the ball’s in your court to prove that you didn’t use the information to make the decision.

CareerBuilder.com did a survey of 3,169 HR managers and asked how many screened applicants by checking their profiles on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.

• 22% said they used the sites to do applicant-background checks, up from 11% a year ago.
• 34% of those who used the sites said they found something that immediately led to disqualifying the applicant as a viable candidate.
• 41% who disqualified candidates said they were motivated to do so because of profile info about drinking or drug use; 40% said they nixed candidates because of inappropriate photos.
• Another 9% said they didn’t do research on social-networking sites but planned to do so in the near future.
• On the plus side, 24% said they found info that improved the candidate’s chances of getting hired — such as qualifications, good communication skills or imaginative use of social networking.
• And some applicants aren’t clueless about the trend; 16% said they’d tailored their profile info to appeal to potential employers.